Project Inspiration:
The inspiration for our project comes from Thera Metrey, a social enterprise developed in 2016 by Penn State University and Lehigh University students and which trains Cambodian villagers to cultivate paddy straw mushrooms. Thera Metrey’s affiliate farmers now produce thousands of kilos of mushrooms per year through a network of several hundred mushroom houses.
Project History:
2018: The project is founded. The team focuses on developing low-tech methods for propagating grain spawn.
2019: The team grows mushrooms for the first time and travels to Makeni, Sierra Leone to build a mushroom grow house, where small-scale production is initiated and carried out for a few months by our in-country partners.
2020: The team writes and publishes our first journal article on our cultivation methods. Production in Sierra Leone is suspended due to disruptions including COVID. The team conducts remote summer experiments focused around improving our production process, which serve as the basis for a second journal article published in 2021
Spring 2021: The team adds two new members from the Class of 2024 and focuses its efforts on testing scalable low-tech pasteurization methods and making additional improvements to our production process.
Summer 2021: Two team members work full-time on resolving some of the technical issues with our cultivation methods, including developing improved low-tech spawn production methods, incubating and fruiting mushrooms outdoors in hot weather, and improving the scalability of our production process.
Fall 2021: Based on knowledge gained over the summer, the team redesigns the production process to be more efficient and scalable and uses it to conduct a series of large-scale production trials that produce a combined total of over 100 pounds of mushrooms over the course of several weeks.
Winter 2022 (planned): With COVID-related travel restrictions finally loosening, the team travels to Makeni, Sierra Leone for three weeks to collaborate with a local entrepreneur on the establishment of a mushroom production facility in hopes of achieving consistent large-scale production by early Spring 2022.